Workshop on Quality Software:
A Festschrift for Bjarne Stroustrup

Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
April 27-28, 2012

General Information

The Workshop on Quality Software: A Festschrift for Bjarne Stroustrup
honored and celebrated the career of Bjarne Stroustrup.
The workshop was held at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX.
The program included an opening reception on the evening of Thursday,
April 26, technical presentations on April 27-28, and a banquet which
included reminiscences about Bjarne on the evening of Friday, April 27.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++.
He took an active role in the creation of the
ANSI/ISO standard for C++
and continues to work on the maintenance and revision of that standard.
Over the last decade,
C++ has become the most widely used language supporting object-oriented
programming by making abstraction techniques affordable and manageable
for mainstream projects. Using C++ as his tool, Stroustrup has pioneered
the use of object-oriented and generic programming techniques in
application areas where efficiency is a premium; examples include
general systems programming, switching, simulation, graphics,
user-interfaces, embedded systems, and scientific computation. For about
two decades, C++ has been among the most widely used
programming languages. The influence of C++ and the
ideas it popularized are clearly visible far beyond the C++ community.
Languages including C, C#, Java, and Fortran99 provide features
pioneered for mainstream use by C++, as do systems such as COM and CORBA.

His book "The C++ Programming Language" (Addison-Wesley, first edition
1985, second edition 1991, third edition 1997, "special" edition 2000)
is the most widely read book of its kind and has been translated into
at least 19 languages
A later book, "The Design and
Evolution of C++" (Addison-Wesley, 1994) broke new ground in the
description of the way a programming language was shaped by ideas,
ideals, problems, and practical constraints. His recent programming
textbook Programming -- Principles and Practice using C++
, has (so far) been translated into 7 languages. In
addition to his five books, Stroustrup has published more than a hundred
academic and more popular papers.

Bjarne Stroustrup was elected member of
The National Academy of Engineering
in 2004 "for the creation of the C++
programming language". As the first computer scientist ever, he was
awarded the
2005
William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from Sigma Xi
(the scientific research society). He was given the
IEEE
Computer Society's 2004 Computer Entrepreneur Award
"for pioneering the development and commercialization of industrial-strength,
object-oriented programming technologies, and the profound changes they
fostered in business and industry." He is an AT&T Bell Laboratories
Fellow and an AT&T Fellow. He received the 1993 ACM Grace Murray Hopper
award "for his early work laying the foundations for the C++ programming
language. based on those foundations and Dr. Stroustrup's continuing
efforts, C++ has become one of the most influential programming
languages in the history of computing". Member of the
Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science.
He is an ACM fellow and an IEEE fellow.
He received the
2008 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming award
for "advancing the
craft of computer programming". He served on the Danish Research
Council. He was named one of "America's twelve top young scientists" by
Fortune Magazine in 1990 and as one of "the 20 most influential people
in the computer industry in the last 20 years" by BYTE magazine in 1995.
In 1990, "The Annotated C++ Reference Manual" received Dr Dobb's "Jolt
Cola" award for excellence in technical documentation. In 1995, "The
Design and Evolution of C++" received a Dr Dobb's "Productivity Award"
for helping programmers to improve their code.

Bjarne was born in 1950 and grew up in Aarhus,
the second largest city in Denmark. He went to
Aarhus University studying in the department of
computer science DAIMI, gaining the Danish
equivalent to a good Masters degree in 1975 (a Cand.Scient. degree is rarely
taken in significantly less than six years - at least it wasn't then).
Aarhus is a wonderful town of about 250,000 people beautifully sited on
the East coast of Jutland.

Bjarne did his doctoral work on design of distributed systems in the
Computing Laboratory
of Cambridge University, England,
receiving his Ph.D. in computer science in 1979.
He is a member of Churchill College,
where he and his wife, Marian, spent some
wonderful and busy years and where their daughter, Annemarie, was born.
Cambridge
is another wonderful town and one of the magical places of the world.
His thesis advisor in Cambridge was
David Wheeler
and he also spent significant time talking with (learning from)
Roger Needham.
He didn't really get to know
Maurice Wilkes
until years later. He shared an office with
Bruce Croft,
Jeremy Dion,
Neil Grey,
David Harper,
Andy Hopper,
and Mark Pezzaro.

In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup, together with his wife and daughter, moved
to New Jersey to join the
Computer Science Research Center of Bell Telephone Laboratories
(colloqually know as 127 or 1127).
Over the years, they lived in Summit, Meyersville, and
Watchung - all about 10 minutes drive from
Bell Labs'
main research site in Murray Hill.
A son, Nicholas, was born in Meyersville. After the 1984 break-up
of the Bell System, Bell Labs became AT&T Bell Labs, and after the 1995
break-up of AT&T, AT&T Bell Labs was itself split into
AT&T Labs
and
Lucent Technologies Bell Labs.
From its inception, Bjarne was a member of
AT&T Labs - Research,
the half of Bell Labs Information Sciences Research that
AT&T kept to itself as
Lucent
and NCR were spun off.
Bjarne was the head of the Large-Scale Programming Research Department
from its creation in AT&T Bell Labs until late 2002 when he joined
the
Department of Computer Science
of Texas A&M University.

He and his wife live in
College Station,
Texas.
Their daughter is a medical doctor and their
son is a graduate student in systems biology.
His non-research interests include general history, light literature,
photography, hiking and running, travel, and music.